


in my defense, spring

by schweet_heart



Series: Merlin Fic [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Reincarnation, Resurrection, Violence, terminal illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur comes back too early, because he can't stand watching Merlin suffer alone. </p><p>He always did have terrible timing.</p><p>Inspired by <a href="http://ofkingsandlionhearts.tumblr.com/post/89415890326/bittersweet-the-dreams-we-made-were-so-young-we">this</a> tumblr post.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in my defense, spring

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for further warnings.

 

 

Merlin is fairly sure he’s mostly unconscious when he hears the voice — _Arthur’s_ voice. 

 

_Just let me help him — please, he’s hurt!_

 

_It is not yet time, my lord. If you return now, you will upset the balance._

 

_Please. He’s my friend._

 

It’s likely that he’s either hallucinating or dying or both but he decides (even as he keeps crawling, keeps trying to get to safety) that it’s not so bad, because there’s Arthur, and — well. There’s Arthur. And that’s a hell of a lot more than he was expecting, really.

 

 

+

 

 

He wakes up in hospital, to the smell of antiseptic and quiet hum of machinery. The room he’s in is blindingly decorated in mint green and white, and he knows there are other people close by — he can hear the sound of voices, one woman muttering something to herself over and over, a man and a woman talking — but he can’t see them because the curtain around his bed is drawn close. Everything hurts. His face, his ribs, every bone in his fingers and the heels of his feet, which seems horribly stupid all things considered and yet somehow only to be expected. He’s not sure how much of the pain is age and how much is because he’s just been beaten within an inch of his life, but either way he’s not sure that it matters terribly much.

 

“The guy who brought me here,” Merlin says, when the nurse comes to check on him. “Did he leave a name?”

 

She looks at him, a little oddly. “You mean the woman who found you? The police took her statement, love, but she said she didn’t see anything useful. Sorry.”

 

“No,” Merlin says, frowning in confusion, because he could have sworn — “There was a guy.”

 

The nurse’s expression softens, and she leans forward to plump his pillows without his asking.

 

“Your memory’s probably a little hazy,” she says. “It’s normal. Those yobs really did a number on you, and the medication sometimes messes with your head.” She’s smiling. “We gave you the good stuff. Nothing but the best for our resident celebrity, I promise.”

 

Merlin smiles weakly back at her, but it’s difficult to sustain for long as disappointment settles in the pit of his stomach. Of course, he’d been dreaming. That was all it was.

 

 

+

 

 

They’re surprised by how quickly he heals. Merlin isn’t. It’s tiresome, waiting for them to let him go, but it’s not as if he has anywhere better to be. He keeps the curtains drawn tightly and takes no visitors, except for the police he can’t avoid, and the nursing staff gradually learn not to try to engage him in conversation. He’s grateful for that, at least. He really, _really_ doesn’t want to talk about it any more than he has to.

 

When they finally release him, Merlin dodges a crowd of persistent journalists who want to ask him about his latest brush with death and doesn’t even feel guilty about it. He wonders how they would react if he told them just how little it would have mattered in the long run. He’s been dead before, and he only ends up coming back again — again and again, like he’s the chewing-gum caught on a cosmic shoe, unable to shake himself loose. He’s been so many different people over the years he’s started to lose track, but his body hasn’t; each one of them is impressed on his bones like muscle memory, like every time he dies he’s weighed down just a little more, and sometimes it’s on the tip of his tongue to tell everyone who he is and what he can do; what he’s waiting for. He doesn’t say anything, however. He’s not sure the world is ready for reincarnated wizards just yet.

 

 

+

 

 

Arthur’s waiting in his flat. Merlin lets himself in and closes the door and nearly drops the keys in shock, and Arthur’s staring at him from the sofa, one ankle hooked behind the other, for all the world as if he belongs there. He’s still wearing the same damned suit of armour that he had on when he died.

 

“Oh, brilliant,” Merlin says, his voice too-loud over the pounding in his ears. “Well, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting to lose my mind one of these days, but I have to admit my subconscious is unexpectedly cruel and masochistic. Well done, me.”

 

Arthur doesn’t get up. “Don’t be stupid, _Mer_ lin. It’s me.”

 

“Which is exactly what you would say, if you were a hallucination,” Merlin points out. He recovers, slowly, bends down to pick up his keys and backs into the kitchen, never taking his eyes off Arthur. He puts the kettle on and brews up a cup of tea to give himself something to do with his hands, to distract himself from the way they’re shaking. Late afternoon sunlight filters in through the curtains and lights up Arthur’s hair. “You can’t be real.”

“It _has_ been said that I’m too good to be true.”

 

“Prat.” Merlin pours the tea, and a moment later realises he’s made two cups without thinking about it. What the hell, he decides. Just go with it. “Do you take milk? Sugar?”

 

“How the hell would I know?” Arthur responds irritably, and Merlin has to bite back a hysterical giggle because, of course, Arthur has never had tea before. “Just make it the way you usually do.”

 

“How do you know what I usually do?” Merlin says, adding extra sugar to Arthur’s tea and then feeling stupid, because he hates it too sweet and he’s going to have to be the one to drink it when this hallucination disappears. “For all you know, I could like my tea with tabasco sauce and lizard guts.”

 

Arthur shifts in his seat, looking away. He hasn’t changed at all; even in profile, he’s ridiculously gorgeous. He’s also hiding something.

 

“I didn’t come back from the dead to have you poison me with reptile entrails,” he says, stern.

 

“Then why _did_ you come back?”

 

“I had to make sure you were all right.” 

 

“I’m not all right,” Merlin says honestly. “But there’s really not a lot you can do about it.”

 

 

+

 

 

“So you’re a magician,” Arthur says later, looking at the awards lining Merlin’s walls, the photographs of him performing his tricks in front of crowds of admiring fans. “Isn’t that a bit like cheating?”

 

Merlin shrugs. “I prefer to think of it as dramatic irony.”

 

“Still hiding in plain sight, then?”

 

Merlin thinks of the TV shows, the YouTube videos, the public performances. He smiles. “Not so much, anymore.”

 

“No.” Arthur looks at the photographs. “No, I suppose not. And are you happy?”

 

“You already know the answer to that.”

 

 

+

 

 

When Merlin retires to bed that evening, he leaves the former king of Camelot curled up on the sofa under a shaggy afghan, his knees drawn up to his chest and the television on. 

 

“I like the noise,” he says, when Merlin offers to turn it off. “It stops me from thinking.”

 

Merlin just nods and goes to his own room. It’s absurdly like having a houseguest, and he thinks perhaps the attack has jumbled his brain still further, blurred the lines between fiction and reality.  He should probably be more concerned, but instead he just feels…comforted. There are worse things than imagining his long-dead friend has returned to help him through this. 

 

He takes the medication the doctor gave him, swallowing it down dry, and turns out the light, thinking: anyway, Arthur will probably be gone in the morning.

 

 

+

 

 

Arthur isn’t gone in the morning.

 

Merlin wakes early with his head throbbing, the pain in his left temple sharp enough to have him seeing double. He sits up and presses his hands to his eyes, breathing slow and even until the worst of it fades. Shuffling out into the living area, glass of water in hand, the first thing he sees is the two tea cups sitting on the coffee table in the middle of the lounge.

 

Two cups. His own, and Arthur’s, the latter entirely empty and his own still a quarter full.

 

Merlin drops his glass.

 

 

+

 

 

“Merlin. _Merlin!_ Let me in, damn you.” 

 

The hammering on the bathroom door is threatening to bring his headache back full force, reverberating off the tiles around him into a cacophony of sound, but he can’t bring himself to move. Arthur is really back, alive, _here_ , just outside in the hallway, and it would be brilliant if it weren’t also devastating. Arthur always did have the most terrible sense of timing.

 

“Merlin.” The king has stopped knocking now, and Merlin can picture him leaning against the door in frustration, bracing himself with both arms. “I’m here now. Why wont you let me in?”

 

"Go away,” Merlin says.

 

Arthur makes a sound like an irritated cat. “I can’t go away, _Mer_ lin. In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t Camelot and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me for the duration.”

 

Merlin closes his eyes. He wants to laugh, in a way, because _fuck_. He’s waited so long to hear that, and now…

 

“Please, just let me in.”

 

He gets to his feet and unlocks the door. Arthur stumbles a little, taken by surprise, but quickly rights himself, staring at Merlin.

 

“You’ve been crying.”

 

Merlin shrugs. 

 

“Why have you been crying?”

 

“Dunno.”

 

They look at each other — just look. Arthur’s hair is still rumpled from sleep and he’s wearing a pair of Merlin’s pyjama bottoms, too long for him, Merlin’s Led Zeppelin t-shirt pulled taut over his muscular shoulders. Somewhere in the flat there’s a pile of rusted armour waiting for Merlin to clean it, he thinks, somewhat hysterically. Assuming he even remembers how.

 

“Why did you come back?” Merlin blurts, without thinking. “Why now?”

 

“I already told you,” Arthur says. His face, when he smiles, is soft and tentative in unfamiliar ways. “You’re a bit useless without me, you know.”

 

“Yeah,” Merlin says. “Yeah, maybe I am.”

 

 

+

 

 

There’s very little time, and yet it still takes Merlin three days to work up the courage to kiss him. He feels every one of his scrapes and bruises as he does it, as if the gentleness of Arthur’s mouth against his presses into every tender part of him, indelible. 

 

The king doesn’t react as he’d expected. There’s no disdain, and hardly even any surprise. 

 

“Finally arrived at it, have you?” he asks, sounding amused.

 

“Sire?”

 

“You’ve been _pining_ ,” Arthur says, with a grin.

 

Merlin hits him. “I have not, you ass.”

 

“Since _Camelot_ ,” Arthur stresses.

 

“And how would you know if I was? Or is that just your enormous ego speaking?”

 

At this, Arthur finally sobers, and his expression turns sad. “Once a year, every year, they’d give me a window into your life for twenty-four hours, let me see how you were doing. I don’t think they were really supposed to, but I insisted. It helped to make the waiting pass more quickly.”

 

He traces a finger up the side of Merlin’s face, lingering at the corner of his mouth; beneath his eyelashes. 

 

“It really was very boring without you, Merlin,” he says. “I never thought the afterlife would be so tedious, but there were surprisingly few people as prone to tripping over their own feet as you are. And none of them had ears quite the same shape.”

 

Arthur’s eyes are very blue, a fact which Merlin seems to have forgotten until now. 

 

“How terrible it must have been for you, sire,” he says, mock serious. “To have no one to ridicule and torment for so long.”

 

“How terrible indeed,” Arthur agrees, and kisses him back.

 

 

+

 

 

“I can’t really do magic anymore,” Merlin confesses, on the fifth day. “Not the big stuff, anyway. At best, I can do little things like pull rabbits out of hats and turn doves into handkerchiefs. Most of it disappeared after you — and then Kilgharrah — “

 

Arthur doesn’t say anything at the time, his head pillowed companionably on Merlin’s lap, one knee drawn up, the other dangling. Merlin wonders if he’s even heard, but that night when the two of them are together in Merlin’s bed he whispers apologies into Merlin’s skin, soothing him with his touch as if the centuries-old ache were still fresh.

 

“I’m here now,” he says, over and over. “For as long as you’ll have me.”

 

 _Forever_ , Merlin thinks, and wishes that could be enough.

 

 

+

 

 

In Merlin’s defense, he doesn’t think it will happen this soon, or this quickly. He thinks they have weeks, even months, right up until the moment that he feels it — like a dam bursting in his head, jarring everything loose.

 

“Arthur?” he says. Blood is dripping from his nose and he can’t see his fingers when he reaches up to touch it. The world is strangely horizontal. “Arthur, I — “

 

From here, he is vividly aware of the crocus in the next-door neighbour’s window-garden, and the gutter is full of twigs where birds have attempted to make nests in it. There are still bruises on his face and ribs that haven’t healed, and there’s still so much they need to talk about, so many things that need to be said. But time is the one thing they always seem to run out of, and suddenly there’s no more of it left.

 

“Arthur,” he says. _I’m sorry._

 

 

+

 

 

_Merlin?_

 

_Merlin, you idiot, say something._

 

_Don’t — don’t you dare leave me like this. Do you hear me?_

 

_Please._

 

_Please, Merlin, I —_

 

 

+

 

 

The first thing Merlin always remembers is coming up over the hill to see Camelot in the distance, its spires sharp and clear against the morning sky. He used to wonder why it is that which stands out for him, more than anything else — more than his mother, singing to him as a child; more than Gaius’ workshop and the smell of old herbs and tinctures, the crumbling stalks of lavender drying in the sun. He remembers the castle more clearly than his father’s face, or even his own reflection. 

 

In his memory, it’s springtime, the world only just on the cusp of reawakening after a long winter. He remembers the blue of the sky, the weight of the pack at his back, the sense of new possibilities unfurling at his feet. Later, he realises that it is this which keeps drawing his mind back to this moment above all others. The hope in it. He thinks, _maybe this time_ ; and then he keeps on walking. He thinks, _maybe I’m home_. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warning:** Major character death, depictions of terminal illness.


End file.
